Recovery of protein hydrolysates from brewer’s spent grain using enzyme and ultrasonication

The aim of this study was to develop a green ultrasound-assisted enzymatic process to separate protein from brewer’s spent grain (BSG) to produce protein hydrolysates and determine the physicochemical properties of produced protein hydrolysates. When the enzyme (Alcalase) loading increased from 1 to 20 μL g⁻¹ BSG, the protein separation efficiency increased from 34.0% to 61.6%. The application of ultrasound pretreatment further increased protein separation efficiency to 69.8%. More promisingly, the ultrasound pretreatment was able to reduce enzyme loading by 73% and decrease enzyme incubation time by 56%. The produced protein hydrolysates had molecular weights lower than 15 kDa and high protein solubilities at the pH of 1.0–11.0. The ultrasound pretreatment improved the protein solubility to above 90%. Glutamic acid and proline were the most abundant amino acids in produced protein hydrolysates. This study demonstrated that enzymatic hydrolysis along with ultrasound pretreatment is an effective way to separate protein from BSG.